Broad Russian Support for Repression at Home and Aggression Abroad Result of Long-Term Social Trends and Won’t Change Instantly When Putin Leaves the Scene, Shusharin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 13 – In recent decades, Russian society has been so arranged that it leads people to favor repression at home and aggression abroad, Dmitry Shusharin says. As polling shows, these are long-term trends that are not going to change overnight when Vladimir Putin leaves power.

            Those who view the repression at home and the war in Ukraine as solely Vladimir Putin’s doing are only deceiving themselves or seeking to deceive others so that they will gain the support needed to come to power after his exit, the author of the 2017 volume on Russian totalitarianism says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66BB996A464E9).

            Those who are want to understand what is happening in Russia and what likely will happen well into the future need to recognize that the societal consensus in support of repression and aggression is perhaps even more influential in keeping people in line than repression by the authorities.

            As a result of social changes since the end of Soviet times, Shusharin continues, “the Russian army is now just as organize to the social, political and economic system of Russia as it existed under Peter I, Catherine II, Stalin and Brezhnev,” the result of the socio-economic system now in place which makes people look to the military and security systems as real lifts.

            According to the analyst, “the mood of young people is determined by this socio-economic situation and the trends of its development.” And because that is the case, both the military and the law enforcement agencies “will continue to attract more and more restless young people who cannot find work, open a business or get an education.”

            That means, of course, that the Putin regime is not the occupier some want to believe but in fact an expression of the socio-economic model of society that arose in the criminalized 1990s and grew into the militarized and criminalized-militarist society of the present day, Shusharin argues.

            And because these developments have occurred over a long period and affected a large swath of the population, “hopes for change over the course of three days” or assertions that “only Putin needs the war” are nonsense. What is going on now is “a Russian people’s war, not Putin’s war alone.”